The least visited countries in the world revealed, from island states in the Pacific and Caribbean to dots on the map of Europe

A long time ago, when we used to travel far, far away, there were some countries most of us never seemed to visit even when we could. Some didn’t want us, some had little room for us, and some were just too awkward to get to or failed to offer enough of interest to make the effort worthwhile.

The United Nations World Tourism Organisation’s (UNWTO) annual International Tourism Highlights 2020 sets out just where the crowds went in the last pre-pandemic year of 2019, but also reveals from where they mostly stayed away.

The figures are often provisional, rounded to the nearest thousand, and are incomplete. Some destinations are too war-torn to report, and anyway uninviting to all but the most dedicated country counter.

Not every territory is one of the UN’s 191 members, and some are comprehensively cagey, such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, although this is not as unpopular a destination as might be imagined.

Beijing-based Koryo Tours reports taking 1,500 of a total of 4,000 “European” customers (the North Korean term for those who are neither Japanese nor Chinese) in 2019, but estimates that there were around 250,000 Chinese visitors in the same year.

Those caveats aside, it is possible to use the UNWTO figures to divine the destinations the globe’s travellers largely shunned, although many seem oddly similar to those most successful.